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I am Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I am also the editor of the academic journal The Latin Americanist.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

“There has been a slight window of hope since the exhumation,” Joan Jara told me in January 2013:

There is concrete evidence now: Víctor’s identity was legally confirmed and it was established that his death was a homicide. There is ballistic evidence. There have been a number of judges in the last 40 years. The interesting thing is that the new judge is not from a human rights background; he is a criminal judge. This has produced different results. The investigative work of the police has produced enormous results recently. Former conscripts are beginning to talk about what they witnessed. They had been seriously threatened over the years and they had been living in fear. The investigation has produced witnesses who saw these officers in the stadium, even though they deny it.

This comes just as Pablo Neruda's body is being exhumed for an autopsy. Justice may be incomplete (Augusto Pinochet, after all, died without ever being convicted of anything) and long in coming but it can come even after many years.